5 minute read
On Main Hall
On
MAIN HALL
A WORD FROM HEAD OF SCHOOL WILLY MACMULLEN ’78
Three Scenes: Access & Affordability
My guess is most readers are familiar with the idea of “opportunity cost.” It’s the concept that gets at what we give up when we choose one option over another, the “forgone benefit that would have been derived from the option not chosen.” I’ve been thinking about opportunity cost and what Taft would be if we did not have the financial aid commitment we have today and some of the students on our campus never came. Three scenes got me thinking about this. Here’s the first scene: an October evening, Bingham Auditorium, a deafening standing ovation as the curtain drops on the cast of the musical production of The Addams Family. There were 60 students involved, from all four classes. About half were experienced thespians, the remainder rookies. They acted, sang and danced, built and moved sets, applied makeup and did hair, played instruments in the pit, did quick changes into scores of costumes, ran lights and sound. They came from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Virginia, North Dakota, and Colorado—and also Canada, China, Bermuda, Moldova, and Japan. They rehearsed for two hours a day, five days a week, for two months. They wrung their hands anxiously through Tech Week, and then for three nights, they rocked Bingham and left audiences cheering. Sixty students and a score of adults pulled off the impossible, gave us a show that brought a COVID-weary community together, and experienced something they will never forget.
Here’s the second scene: sitting in the STEM classroom on a Wednesday morning to hear three presentations by student groups in faculty member Dan Calore’s Introduction to Engineering class.
The assignment was an authentic and challenging one: students were asked to identify an area of campus that had functional deficits that they wanted to upgrade. That meant interviewing stakeholders who used the space; next, undergoing a build-design process; then completing the “testing” of spatial and engineering assumptions; and finally, creating a polished multimedia proposal.
The nine students—from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, Serbia, Canada, and Bermuda— chose three different spaces: a team film room, the weight room, and a spare training room. They had to ask hard questions: How is the room used? What are its shortcomings? How can we improve aesthetic and function? They used sophisticated technology: 3D printing using Thingiverse, Tinkercad drawings, a laser cutter. One group had a three-dimensional scale mock-up, with seating created by the printer; another had rotational CAD images projected on a screen allowing for virtual navigation of the room.
They had to collaborate to solve engineering problems, employ multiple tech platforms, and with the head of school, classmates, and teacher in the audience, present a compelling vision of how the space could be improved and transformed. I remember thinking, I’ve had presentations from professional firms that were not as good.
Here’s the final scene: the boys’ varsity soccer, finishing their 19–0 season with a heart-aching overtime loss on penalty kicks in the New England Prep School Athletic Conference championship.
That this was a season for the ages is clear: They scored 101 goals and only gave up 10; they were Founders League and WNEPSSA Champions; and they were awarded the Western Connecticut Soccer Officials Association Sportsmanship Award. They had five players from Connecticut, and one each from Idaho and New York, as well as from Ghana, England, Dominican Republic, Germany, Bermuda, Canada, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, and Malawi. They had come together, shared a love of the game and each other, performed at a level we have never seen, saw a hillside of fans cheer them on. They had shared an experience they would carry with them forever, like a charm in a pocket, a pebble in a shoe.
Now, here’s what I know. Every year, over a third of Taft students receive financial aid, with average grants of about $50,000, and with an annual budget of nearly $10 million. That means we should ask this question: What would the opportunity cost be if we were unable to enroll those students, if you pulled a third of them from those three scenes?
Here’s what would happen.
First, we would be a lesser school—still a good school, but a decidedly diminished one. Audiences would not have seen the same musical, a teacher would not have watched the same presentations, and fans would not have cheered on an undefeated team. Sure, good and maybe even great things would have happened instead—we put on a play, teach classes, and play games every year—but they would not have been the same. Those scenes would never have happened. We would not be the school we were, and that’s almost impossibly painful to consider.
Second, those students I saw, doing such extraordinary things, having such memorable moments, knowing the intellectual and personal growth, experiencing such profound swings of emotion, feeling their destinies deflected—they would have lost the opportunity and missed out on an experience that certainly was life-changing. Who knows what their fall term would have been, perhaps at another private school, perhaps in their neighborhood public school. But I know this: they would not have experienced what they did here.
If we want to think about opportunity cost, perhaps we should ask those three groups of students what it feels like to contemplate not having that scene in their lives.
Opportunity cost is a strange concept: it’s about what you did not have, never knew. It’s about loss and the contemplation of negation. When I think of those three scenes, and when I think of the Board of Trustees and its commitment to making Taft affordable and accessible to students, when I think of the generous Tafties who have contributed the dollars to set up scholarships, I think of these students: what they gave Taft, what they gained themselves. A semester without those three scenes and the opportunity cost? Incalculable.
William R. MacMullen ’78
